The nightly builds of Transmission are loads better than the stable 0.6 that's offered on the site.

I get better speeds with Transmission on heavily seeded torrents, but I get more seeds and peers with Azureus on the obscure ones. Personally, I'd prefer to use Transmission exclusively. It's a great BT client.

If you're looking for something more similar to Xtorrent than Transmission, I recommend BitRocket. It's still a little rough around the edges in parts, but I don't really have any major issues with it.

Transmission is great. And don't worry, unless you use obscure trackers I've never heard of you won't be banned.

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Then you haven't heard of very many trackers. A number of them that I frequent ban Transmission. In fact, the only Mac client that passes muster with the main one I use is Azureus -- which I hate so much (because it's such an ugly memory hog) that I use uTorrent through Parallels instead.

Transmission is nice for simple work on general trackers, but it's lacking in options and is usually banned on private trackers.

Then you haven't heard of very many trackers. A number of them that I frequent ban Transmission. In fact, the only Mac client that passes muster with the main one I use is Azureus -- which I hate so much (because it's such an ugly memory hog) that I use uTorrent through Parallels instead.

Transmission is nice for simple work on general trackers, but it's lacking in options and is usually banned on private trackers.

I'll put in a plug for Transmission for the sake of simplicity. Nothing beats loading a torrent and walking away. It's pretty fool-proof. Azureus, though, is kind of a pain IMO. I don't always get fast DL speeds, and I'm not a fan of having to change ports, etc. so that I can get efficient speeds. (but that's another issue...it could be user error...).

In the case of Transmission, it has a bug (that's been fixed in the nightlies, but not in the released, "stable" versions) that causes it to ignore the report interval requested by the tracker. Transmission defaults to reporting, I think, every 5 minutes, which effectively SLAMS the server with data and causes the tracker to chug.

...and that's just one of the bugs Transmissions has that has caused it to get banned from numerous trackers. If you search around these forums, I think there are a few threads that discuss T's problems in more detail. The Reporting Bug, however, is the main one that causes trouble.

"best" is purely subjective. Azureus may be the most fully-featured, but an ass-load of features doesn't necessarily make it the best.

Personally, I don't think any of them are all that good. I think a libtorrent-based client with a Transmission-like GUI would be "the best"...but unless I do it myself, or someone does it for me, it's just not in the cards currently.

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